Objective: Impaired recognition of fearful expressions has been documented across a wide range of antisocial populations but it remains unresolved whether this deficit reflects impaired attention to fearful expressions or is restricted to categorization. Here, we used visual search to investigate the relationship between impaired visual attention and emotion recognition in a group of violent offenders and healthy controls. Method: Task 1 measured attentional guidance by physical and affective saliency. Participants indicated the gender of a face identity singleton in an array of neutral distractor faces with a different identity. Singletons were paired with additional physical (color) or affective (happy, angry, fearful expression) task-irrelevant features. Task 2 used similar search displays but required participants to categorize the emotional expression of a happy, angry, or fearful target face in an array of neutral distractors. Results: In Task 1, both groups’ visual search was aided by both physical and affective features, providing no evidence for impaired incidental processing of affective or physical saliency in violent offenders. In Task 2, violent offenders showed impaired explicit categorization performance, particularly for fearful expressions. Visual search performance was not correlated with self-reported psychopathy. Conclusion: Impaired processing of affective stimuli in antisociality results from later processing stages related to explicit recognition and categorization. These deficits are not restricted to individuals with elevated psychopathic traits but are linked to antisociality more generally. These findings represent a first step in localizing the fear processing deficit along the processing hierarchy in violent offenders, demonstrating intact attentional guidance but impaired categorization.

中文翻译：

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暴力犯罪者的恐惧处理能力不足：完整的注意指导但显式分类受损。

目标：各种各样的反社会人群对恐惧表达的识别能力受损，但这种缺陷是否反映了人们对恐惧表达的关注程度下降或仅限于分类尚待解决。在这里，我们使用视觉搜索调查了一组暴力犯罪者和健康对照组中视觉注意力受损和情绪识别之间的关系。方法：任务1通过身体和情感显着性来测量注意指导。参与者在一系列具有不同身份的中性干扰物面部中指出了面部身份单例的性别。单身人士与其他与任务无关的身体（肤色）或情感（快乐，愤怒，恐惧的表情）任务配对。任务2使用类似的搜索显示，但要求参与者将快乐，生气或恐惧的目标面孔的情感表达分类为一系列中性的干扰物。结果：在任务1中，两组的视觉搜索都受到了身体和情感特征的帮助，没有证据表明暴力犯罪者对情感或身体显着性的偶然处理受损。在任务2中，暴力犯罪者表现出明显的分类表现受损，尤其是对于恐惧表情。视觉搜索性能与自我报告的心理疾病无关。结论：反社交中情感刺激的处理受损是由于后期处理与显式识别和分类有关。这些缺陷不仅限于精神病性状升高的人，而且更普遍地与反社会联系在一起。这些发现代表了在暴力犯罪者中沿着处理等级定位恐惧处理缺陷的第一步，这表明完整的注意力指导但削弱了分类。